Return to Art Crossing

Rachael is tired because she's just eaten chocolate tacos and now she's feeling super lazy and wants to lie dead on Joey's bed.

Ahem. I've finally got back into Art Crossing again! Art Crossing is a fantastic group where you are assigned a profile of a random unknown deviant to make a gift for, and for each gift you send, another deviant will send you something in return! I've managed to convince Joey to sign up to, and she's pretty excited! You can see the group's page here.

The profile I've received is for a 20 year old in Canada, and from her extremely long profile, I picked up on that she likes fantasy animals such as dragons and griffins, and although her favourite colour is a rich red, the colours of royal purple, blue and peacock green closely follow.




This made me think along the lines of peacock colours in general, and using such as a colour palette and/or texture to apply to a dragon or griffin. At first I thought I'd try a griffin, since I'd experimented with dragons once before on an Art Crossing gift, and griffins should be easier to reference since it's common to see statues of them.

However.. I soon realised that griffins probably aren't the best animal suited to a peacock theme... so I resorted to dragons.

First step is to find lots of reference images of different styles and types of dragon that interest me, and make sketches from these...

And then I play around a little, taking the parts I like most from the sketches and tweaking them a little - working with form and posture, and extending claws and horns etc.

On the left are my first initial sketches. I liked the face but wasn't fond of the pose. The arm and leg were particularly difficult to draw and make look realistic. tried to make the wing style dark and harsh, with sharp hooks and jagged edges, though I thought these could be made bigger.








I then developed further and sketched the designs on the right. I much prefer the overall shape and form of the dragon, and I played around with the positioning of the wings and tail. I like the idea of a spiked/webbed back, and I know that the final piece must have a scaly/feathery skin to more resemble the patterning of a peacock.

That's about as far as I got with the gift. I have less than a week to complete it so I better sketch the picture soon and get a move on!